Fourteen years ago, author David Hajdu crafted a superb, perhaps definitive, portrait of Greenwich Village at the height of the folk-music revival of the 1950s and ’60s. But Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street focused on just four artists: seminal figures Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, along with supporting players Mimi Fariña (Baez’s sister) and her husband, Richard. Folk City, the companion to a multimedia exhibit now on display at the Museum of the City of New York, lacks Hajdu’s poetic legerdemain, yet, in its winningly plain-spoken way, provides a far more comprehensive appreciation of one of the most colourful chapters in American music.

The story begins in the 1930s, when the radical likes of Josh White, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie converged in New York. It was the height of the Great Depression, a fertile time for such influential artists to “[redefine] the genre of folk music from a quaint musical form associated with rural life to ‘the people’s music’—a weapon of ideological battle to mobilize workers to develop a class consciousness.” With the advent of the Second World War, the appetite for folk music’s politicized messages abated, yet, as early as 1947, seeds of a revival started to blossom, taking root in and around Washington Square Park. Sunday-afternoon folk singalongs attracted a cross-section of amateurs and pros armed with guitars, banjos and bongos. By the mid-’50s, the Square had become the epicentre of folk’s renaissance, with more than 20 clubs and coffee houses, including the Gaslight Café, the Village Gate and the Bitter End within a five-block radius.

Musicians blended with Beat poets, abstract expressionists, off-Broadway actors and experimental filmmakers to forge a heady countercultural melting pot. A new breed of stars emerged: the Seeger-helmed Weavers (until Seeger fell afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee), Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Baez and Dylan. Their songs carried antiwar, pro-civil-rights messages across the land, achieving mainstream popularity. Hard-core folkies—Phil Ochs, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott—decried the music’s steady commercialization, as the Village devolved from cultural hub to overrun tourist attraction. By 1965, folk had made way for folk-rock and, led by the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Mamas & the Papas, decamped for California. Musically, New York moved on, though it never entirely abandoned the idiom-cum-social-phenomenon that only its perfect storm of liberalism, intellectualism and artistic freedom could have facilitated. To this day, each fall, there’s a Washington Square Park Folk Festival.

Among the phrases Michael Day uses to describe Silvio Berlusconi are: “Saint Silvio of Arcore,” “Emperor Berlusca,” “a sad caricature of himself,” “a mandarin that had been left in the bowl too long,” and “the shadiest leader in the Western world.” As poisonous as the media-mogul-turned-three-time-prime minister has been to his country, his colourful nature—from over-tanned orange to dyspeptic purple—is a godsend for a biographer.

With smirking aplomb, Day, the Italy correspondent for the Independent, writes about Berlusconi’s machinations during a surprisingly long political career, and explains how someone so obviously corrupt could evade conviction so often, and in so public a role. The answer lies in an unholy mix of charm, smarm, audacity, shamelessness and the cunning to take advantage of a political system that was already hopelessly corrupt. Tellingly, Berlusconi worked as both a cruise-ship entertainer and a vacuum-cleaner salesman before developing property with the help of “opaque investments”—sourced, Day alleges, through the Mafia connections Berlusconi has always denied.

From there, he bought newspapers, television stations and soccer powerhouse AC Milan, and sought political power, attempting, Day argues, to carve out legal immunity for himself and his cronies. He’d either buy out his opponents or wage war through the media he controlled. While in power, he would change the law repeatedly to avoid prosecution—or delay court proceedings until he hit the statute of limitations, which protects him to this day. He became a patron saint of tax-evaders, who voted for him en masse. So rare is it, in this book, to find upstanding morals that, when someone refuses to be corrupted, the reader wonders, “What’s wrong with him?”

Considering the gallery of bumbling rogues that surrounded him, it’s tempting to find in Berlusconi something attractive—except when one considers that his exploitative patronage system for young women helped Italy become what Day calls “the land that feminism forgot.” He also allowed historical monuments to be ruined, cozied up to both Gadhafi and Putin, and steered the country into economic straits so dire, the president had to engineer a coup to evict him from office.

Meanwhile, in the court of public opinion, at least, Berlusconi was finally hoisted by his own phallic petard. Day offers a detailed description of the much-disputed term “bunga bunga”: It has to do with a shabby disco room in a villa, singing, costumes, a statue with an enlarged member—and money. It’s money “Il Cavaliere” retains even now, in his political afterlife, proving that, if you write the laws, you can take it with you.

In a recent interview with Men’s Journal, William Finnegan sums up his lifelong passion for surﬁng in fewer than a dozen words: “There’s nothing to say about it. It’s just what I do.” Actually, the 62-year-old Finnegan has plenty to say about it, enough to fill more than 400 pages. That he’s able to keep so seemingly slender a topic fully, indeed poetically, engaging at such length is hardly surprising; Finnegan has served as a New Yorker staff writer for nearly three decades, with a shelf full of awards for his reports on subjects as far-flung as African politics, Mexican drug wars, disaffected L.A. youth, and election violence in El Salvador.

Finnegan’s early days, growing up the son of a TV producer whose projects bounced the family between California and Hawaii, seem straight out of a Beach Boys tune: sun, sand and, beginning at age 14, an endless quest for the perfect wave. After grad school, he and a surf buddy embarked on six years of footloose, often penniless, globetrotting to pursue “a world of unfamiliar reef-edged currents.” Their romp ended in South Africa, and Finnegan took a job as a teacher in Cape Town, discovered the surfing joys of renowned Jeffreys Bay and gathered material for his first book, an insider’s view of apartheid. He landed at the New Yorker in 1987, though to this day remains “half-poised to flee my desk and ditch engagements in order to throw myself into some nearby patch of ocean.”

“Surfing is a secret garden not easily entered,” writes Finnegan. The sport’s nomenclature is, it turns out, surprisingly vast. Anyone whose surf know-how begins and ends with the undulating drumbeat of Wipeout will find themselves drowning in a sea of unfamiliar terms like cutback, pipeline, pintail, barrel and goofyfoot, though Finnegan proves a superb guide through the mire of surf-speak. And he has an investigate journalist’s eye for detail, with seemingly photographic recall of every noteworthy wave he’s surfed across five continents in as many decades.

Though Finnegan’s insatiable thirst for better, more challenging waves and fresh (ideally undiscovered) locales drives his narrative, Barbarian Days is less about living to surf than surfing to live. Yes, surfing was and is his sanctuary; but it has also served as global classroom, building and defining his character while providing priceless life lessons from Maui to Madagascar, Malibu to Madeira. His ethos, his fortitude, his indomitable spirit all stem, directly or indirectly, from “obeying dog-whistle orders from the collective surf’s unconscious.”

Insomnia is a state of nervous distraction, an inability to focus and a craving for new stimuli that happens to make sleep impossible. This slim book roams through ideas about the disorder with the obsessive circular thinking of a sufferer. It is a fascinating and bleak portrait of the insomniac mind kicking against the same question one night after another, unable to stop asking: why me?

Vaughn’s story begins in rural New Brunswick in the 1970s, takes a teenage detour into LCD—the years where his insomnia first begins to seem like a social asset, since he can clean up after the party—and continues to an academic career where pre-dawn work sessions were a clear advantage.

From his lifetime of sleepless nights Vaughn has concluded that we live in an “insomnia culture” with profound implications for how we think and live. It is true we’re sleeping less than ever, and some of the best lines in the book concern the telling ways we think and talk about sleep: “powering through” and “crashing.” Rather than turning into zombies, Vaughn thinks “we’re turning into hummingbirds” of constant attention in response to the demands of 24/7 jobs reinforced by technology. He’s right, though it’s probably not a conspiracy of social control. Moaty-eyed and furry-brained people make easy customers and willing employees, not just docile citizens. Nor are sleep deprivation and insomnia the same thing.

Vaughn has tried all the cures he can buy. Nothing works. Insomnia leaves him misanthropic, so he doesn’t care “who stitched the mattress” or “if the pills end up in the aquifer.” He just wants to be better. And if you do sleep, how can you judge those who don’t?

He admits that what he wants is a fix, a culture he is happy to criticize and identify with at the same time. The search for a cure takes him to a depressing Toronto sleep clinic, a Montreal hospital researcher who speaks of good “sleep hygiene” habits while admitting he doesn’t sleep enough himself, an advertising executive who passes out while answering work emails in a bar bathroom, and Douglas Coupland, who won’t make a meeting before noon.

It is difficult to gracefully move from personal to political, but this is an honest book that asks good questions and leaves you with a vivid picture of the unpleasant and distorting nature of insomnia.

Mostly set in a rowdy, drunken Appalachian boomtown named Keystone in 1910, Hanging opens with impressive comic bravado. Cocksure 30-year-old Abe Baach, possessing “a smile that could sell used snuff,” is a notoriously successful gambler and confidence man who has crossed unforgiving but corrupt lawmen. And with Goldie Toothman, his beautiful girlfriend, he’s scheduled to hang—in Cinder Bottom, the town’s red-light district—as a crowd of 3,000 gathers to gawk at the novelty. Far above, meanwhile, the approach of Halley’s Comet has the nation quaking with thoughts of imminent apocalypse.

Explaining how this couple landed in jail and what’s going to happen to them on the following August morning gives Taylor ample chance to build a crazy plot that suggests Mark Twain by way of Ocean’s Eleven. Flashing back to 1903, 1897, and 1877, he artfully recounts a complicated tale of aspirations, setbacks and retribution in a dizzying land of opportunity that’s lawless, feisty, murderous, and kindhearted in equal parts. If the complex story pieces occasionally overshadow characterization, pay no heed. Taylor’s “unruly work of fiction,” as he calls it, is no sober history. “The people want a big show,” Abe declares on the night before his expected death, and with a bounty of colourful details, Taylor wholly agrees.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-sideshow-of-an-appalachian-novel/feed/0A true-ish story of a Russian oligarch’s rise and fallhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-true-ish-story-of-a-russian-oligarchs-rise-and-fall/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-true-ish-story-of-a-russian-oligarchs-rise-and-fall/#commentsSun, 12 Jul 2015 14:00:33 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=735237Book review: Ben Mezrich's story of Boris Berezovsky, one of Russia's richest oligarchs, tries to fill in the gaps on a legacy steeped in mystery

The mass sell-off of Russian state assets following the collapse of the Soviet Union created a new class of men known as oligarchs, whose wealth had rarely been paralleled, and whose power could save or doom politicians. In July 2000, 18 such men were summoned by Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin, and warned that although they would be allowed to keep their billions, they had to stay out of politics. Underlining the severity of Putin’s warning was the location of the gathering: a dacha that once belonged to the Soviet dictator and mass murderer, Joseph Stalin.

It’s a telling anecdote, one that nicely foreshadows a major plotline in Mezrich’s book: the clash between Boris Berezovsky, one of Russia’s richest oligarchs, and Putin, the man he helped bring to power but against whom he later turned.

The meeting might have transpired as Mezrich describes it, but we can’t know for sure. Although the book title says this is a true story, Mezrich provides few details about his sources. An author’s note reveals that “some settings” and “certain descriptions” have been altered to protect privacy. Then, in tiny type on the page containing the publisher’s address and copyright information, we are told that many characters, locations, physical characteristics and other descriptive details have been changed. And: “Some of the events and characters are also composites of several different events and persons.”

The broad strokes are certainly true: Berezovsky’s astronomical rise; how he turned on Putin; his exile to London; his failed lawsuit against his one-time protege and fellow oligarch, Roman Abramovich; the murder by polonium poisoning of his associate and former Russian secret service agent Alexander Litvinenko; and Berezovsky’s sad descent into irrelevance and apparent suicide by hanging in his bathroom.

Mezrich’s book is about ﬁlling in the details. These are rendered in short, drama-infused chapters that are brisk but often lack depth. Even when superficially told, however, the book is compelling, in parts. Shortly before his death, Berezovsky wrote Putin and pleaded for forgiveness and to be allowed to return home. It’s an action that suggests a confused and tortured soul, and perhaps a president who had become so powerful, even his most ardent foe believed he had no option but to seek reconciliation. It’s a sad story, as much about a country as its oligarchs.

Consider Canadians’ existential relationship with hockey, in all its emotional and psychological complexity: pride in the game’s invention, belief in its mystical connection to some essential Canadianness, punch-to-the-gut dread that foreigners will pervert it or prove better at it—or still worse, do both. Then ratchet up the intensity a thousandfold. That’s the Japanese and their martial arts. From swordplay to unarmed combat, all their budo—the various codified “ways” of traditional warfare—have gone out into the world. This global popularity inspires immense pride in the Japanese, notes Bennett, a professor of Japanese studies at Kansai University in Osaka, but also a lot of anxiety.

Kendo purists are determined not to go the way of judo, the most widespread of the budo, which they think is already a lost cause. Millions participate around the world, and non-Japanese routinely win Olympic judo gold, even if, as one Japanese master sniffed, the foreigners have merely mastered judo’s techniques, not its essence: “It’s not about how to win. How to be is more important.” Kendoists couldn’t agree more, especially with the pretence about being indifferent to winning. Protected by armour, kendoists thrust and strike at each other with bamboo swords; etiquette and style are as important as landing blows, while scoring is almost entirely subjective and interpreted by an overwhelmingly Japanese referee corps.

Then there’s the looming threat of the Koreans, who are willing to adapt scoring in their own version (kumdo) to Olympic standards, thereby threatening Japanese control of international kendo. The Koreans have even won a recent world championship, although not by directly defeating the Japanese, who had already lost in the semifinals to the Americans. (Canadian hockey fans can empathize with that trauma.)

Bennett, who first fell in love with kendo as a 17-year-old exchange student from New Zealand, understands all the tension and contradictions—indeed, he virtually embodies them. He’s frustrated that no matter how long he practises kendo, he will never really “get” it in the eyes of some, given his misfortune in not being born Japanese. At the same time Bennett admits that a core part of kendo’s appeal to foreigners, including him, is its Japanese-ness, its promised window into the soul of a people.

So what’s a besotted outsider to do? In Bennett’s case, write an extraordinary book. It’s at once a first-rate cultural history of Japan’s long relationship with the sword—concentrating on kendo’s 19th-century modernization, which owes as much to contemporary European ideas of manly pursuits as it does to native tradition—and a work of personal therapy in which Bennett sorts out his own complicated feelings. The result is unique and compelling, even for followers of the way of the Zamboni.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/politics-of-kendo/feed/1In defence of a reviled rock’n’roll starmakerhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/in-defence-of-a-reviled-rocknroll-starmaker/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/in-defence-of-a-reviled-rocknroll-starmaker/#commentsFri, 10 Jul 2015 20:54:02 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=736435Book review: Allen Klein: The Man Who Bailed Out The Beatles, Made The Stones and Transformed Rock and Roll

ALLEN KLEIN: THE MAN WHO BAILED OUT THE BEATLES, MADE THE STONES AND TRANSFORMED ROCK & ROLL

Fred Goodman

Allen Klein was a complex cat. As his biography’s title suggests, he saved the Beatles from financial ruin and found the Stones fame and fortune—before having spectacular fallouts with both bands. Goodman, a music journalist, has scaled “mountains of records” and interviews left behind when Klein died in 2009, a largely reviled figure. Klein has been called a “monster of rock,” but he’s humanized here: Having grown up poor in the 1930s and ’40s, in part in a New Jersey orphanage, he became a hustler who was self-assured but needy, too.

By the late ’50s, he was a trained accountant, doggedly pursuing music publishers in the nascent rock’n’ roll business, on the usually correct assumption that they had swindled their clients. He broke apart standard label-friendly contracts to earn artists more royalties; so impressed was Sam Cooke that he hired him as his manager. From there, Klein signed up the world’s two biggest bands, charming both Keith Richards and John Lennon. But Messrs. Jagger and McCartney were skeptics, and Klein’s bull-in-a-record-shop practices could create significant rifts. Goodman doesn’t find that Klein broke up the Beatles, as some have alleged, but even as he extracted the rotten parts of the band’s Apple Corps in the late ’60s, he took big bites from their profits. Artists whom he’d made rich discovered he’d made himself even richer.

Goodman occasionally gets bogged down with contractual details. But characters such as over-the-top Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldman and the stubborn Yoko Ono—both loved and hated Klein—liven up the book. So too do a raft of anecdotes and Klein’s bouts of artistic idealism: he financed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult surrealist film The Holy Mountain, before pulling it from circulation over a financial dispute.

Klein’s story is one of art first nourished and then blighted by commerce; it’s edifying, although it may leave you feeling soiled. One wonders what more might have been accomplished during this supposedly idealistic era if everyone had stopped squabbling over money. Klein would never leave an artist’s career quietly—instead of therapy, writes Goodman, “his balm would be a few decades of litigation.” Why let it bleed when you can let it be?

Under North Korea’s drab, totalitarian regime, daily life is a disturbing blend of banality and terror. In her memoir, Hyeonseo Lee, a high-profile defector who’s emerged as an activist and vocal critic of the regime, recalls how she tried as a young girl to avoid her town’s frequent public executions—attendance was mandatory from elementary school onward—but made an exception for a well-liked local smuggler she knew. “You might think the execution of an acquaintance is the last thing you’d want to see,” she writes; instead, most North Koreans tended to view the gruesome firing squads and hangings more like funerals—unpleasant, but unavoidable. “When the shot hit the popular guy’s head, it exploded, leaving a fine, pink mist,” Hyeonseo recalls vividly. “His family had been forced to watch from the front row.”

It’s just one example of how brutal regimes beget dysfunctional nations. Another: the man wasn’t being punished for trading illicit goods across the border, a relatively ubiquitous occupation in the border town of Hyesan that also employed Hyeonseo’s mother. He was executed because he was doing business when the country was supposed to be mourning the 1994 death of “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung. In other words, it was more dangerous to be seen as disrespectful to the regime than to be caught breaking its laws.

Hyeonseo recalls her indoctrination beginning almost at birth. In school, she was taught that North Korea was the greatest, most well-endowed country in the world and she shouldn’t hesitate to rat out friends or family for not being good communists. As she grew older, however, Hyeonseo began to spot glaring inconsistencies, including a friend’s mother who was boiling corn stalks for dinner despite the country’s vaunted food distribution system. (Thanks to her mom’s illicit activities, Hyeonseo and her brother always had food on the table.) To further broaden her horizons, she decided to slip across the river into China before turning 18, after which she could be punished more severely. She quickly discovered her supposedly superior country was hopelessly backward, and that she didn’t want to go back—nor could she, as her family was forced to say she had gone missing to avoid falling under suspicion themselves.

The long road that finally led Hyeonseo and, eventually, her mother and brother, to South Korean citizenship more than a decade later was littered with sketchy brokers, corrupt officials and numerous close calls—all of which Hyeonseo managed to avoid thanks to steely nerves and what must be one of the world’s best poker faces. As for adjusting to their new lives and freedoms, it’s very much still a work in progress.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/an-inside-view-of-the-hermit-kingdom/feed/1Leo Koretz, the Bernie Madoff of the Roaring Twentieshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/leo-koretz-the-bernie-madoff-of-the-roaring-twenties/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/leo-koretz-the-bernie-madoff-of-the-roaring-twenties/#commentsSun, 07 Jun 2015 14:40:07 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=727205Book review: The story of astonishing duplicity from a man who ran a Ponzi scheme better than Ponzi himself

Notoriety is a curious thing. In 1920, Charles Ponzi swindled investors out of $20 million in a con that was immortalized as a “Ponzi scheme.” Meanwhile, from 1914 to 1923, Leo Koretz, a Chicago lawyer, employed a similar but more elaborate pyramid scheme that bilked hundreds of investors, including close friends and family, out of $30 million (more than $400 million today). Yet he is barely remembered. Halifax journalism professor and business writer Dean Jobb resurrects Koretz and his nefarious exploits in an absorbing tale of astonishing duplicity. As Jobb puts it, Koretz was “the Bernie Madoff of the Roaring Twenties” and “operated his swindle for far longer and with more panache” than Ponzi.

Koretz, a Jewish immigrant with a loving wife, two children and a decent law practice, wanted more of everything. His insatiable greed defined him. By 1905, he was scamming his clients with phony mortgages to finance his upscale lifestyle, and kept an apartment on the side for his assignations with lady friends. He eventually launched his own Ponzi scheme, promising his investors (or suckers) huge dividends from a timber and oil land syndicate in Panama that did not exist.

According to Jobb’s fast-paced narrative, two factors permitted Koretz to con so many otherwise intelligent people for so long. First, like many swindlers, he was charming and persuasive. Even as a youngster in school, he had a talent “for separating people from their money.” And second, the same desire for riches that drove investors to buy overvalued stocks with money they did not have ahead of the 1929 stock market crash played right into Koretz’s hand. Coy on purpose, he had wealthy associates literally begging him to take their money. He happily obliged them. Yet, like all swindlers, from Ponzi to Madoff, eventually, the pyramid crumbled. Koretz did what any cowardly con man would do: He ran. After abandoning his family, he found temporary refuge in Nova Scotia. Once caught, he was sent back to Chicago for a trial and prison. A diabetic, he thwarted justice in 1924 by eating smuggled chocolate and died at age 45 after serving only 34 days of his sentence.

Koretz is no romantic hero, nor does Jobb portray him as one. Simply put, he was a scam artist and a crook. Yet it is difficult to dispute the assessment of Andrew Goodman, a Minneapolis lawyer and Leo’s grand-nephew, that the Koretz swindle is “a great story to tell.” Jobb’s Empire of Deception is proof of that.

In a dozen books published over nearly 15 years, Oliver Sacks has plumbed the most difficult of mysteries about the human brain. From men who mistake their wives for hats to women woken up from Parkinsonian stupor with L-Dopa to anomalies of all five senses, Sacks has relayed case after case with a distinct mix of metaphor, clinical insight, and wells of empathy. On the Move, his newest book, is his most overt attempt at memoir, in which earlier anecdotes and revelations about his personal life converge into a deeply personal meditation about what—and whom—he’s loved throughout his life.

We learn of Sacks’s early love and care of motorbikes, which take him all across the United States in the 1960s, freshly emigrated from England. Sacks takes the reader to Los Angeles’ Muscle Beach, where weightlifting contests give this young neurologist, perpetually afflicted with crippling shyness, a community and sense of purpose that would be undone by excessive drug use (later conquered). He retells earlier stories of clinical cases and of places he’s lived (most notably City Island, a tiny hamlet across from the Bronx) with fresh vigour. And for the first time, Sacks describes his romantic life, wells of feelings for men never fully reciprocated, decades of celibacy, and then, more recently, a late-in-life love that cause Sacks to feel “an intense sense of love, death, and transience, inseparably mixed.”

For all that Sacks’s previous books have addressed his fallible physical state—shattered legs, broken hips, cataracts, deafness, and a bout of cancer among the maladies—On the Move feels like his most blunt address of mortality. Part of this must be deliberate, seeing as Sacks is at his most overtly emotional and personal, but some of it is a quirk of timing; the book has an added layer of poignancy thanks to his New York Times op-ed reveal of terminal cancer earlier this year.

As a result it was impossible, for me, to read On the Move without wondering whether this might be Sacks’s last written address to the public. If so, it’s a stellar coda to a spectacular, singular career in letters. But for goodness sake, let’s hope it’s not. Let’s hope Oliver Sacks keeps moving, with the familiar restlessness of mind and spirit, to the next series of topics that fascinates him, and by extension, us.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-oliver-sacks-we-didnt-know/feed/0‘The Royal We': A delicious romp of a royal romancehttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-royal-we-a-delicious-romp-of-a-royal-romance/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-royal-we-a-delicious-romp-of-a-royal-romance/#commentsMon, 06 Apr 2015 16:57:40 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=702903Patricia Treble on a hilarious, perceptive gem from the creators of the Go Fug Yourself website that doesn't merely retell Kate and William's story

Like royalty, romances are governed by ancient, unchanging rules (Girl meets boy, their relationship is beset by crisis before true love prevails, etc.) So be warned: I discuss—in a very general fashion—the ending of this romance. It will in no way spoil a reader’s enjoyment of the novel.

Once upon a time a handsome prince went to university and fell in love with a beautiful commoner. After the ups and downs of a long courtship, he eventually proposed, giving her the famous ring his mother had once worn. For their marriage in Westminster Abbey, he wore the dress uniform of the Irish Guards, while she wore a white Alexander McQueen.

Nick and Bex lived happily…what, did you think this was about Prince William and Kate Middleton? Pish posh. This is a fairy tale, not reality. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, a.k.a. the Fug Girls behind the witty celebrity blog Go Fug Yourself, have written a delicious romp of a royal romance, The Royal We. It’s a deeply funny, remarkably perceptive take on life behind gilded gates, as well as the sacrifices and compromises demanded of anyone who falls for a good looking royal. There may be the obligatory happy ending, but little else is the earnest fare that usually passes as royal romantic fiction. One expects nothing less from a pair who create sarcastic, snarky, but never cruel posts. “We like to say, ‘We don’t hate your soul, we hate your pants,’ ” Heather Cocks says in an interview with Maclean’s.

While The Royal We is a riff on William and Kate’s romance at St. Andrews University in Scotland, the authors have created their own world, rather than just change a few names and dates. Yet what they’ve created is perhaps as close to seeing inside a relationship with a royal as we’ll ever get. William and Kate’s story is now myth. What no one knows is whether that accepted public account bears any relationship with reality.

In The Royal We, Rebecca “Bex” Porter arrives in Oxford for a term at Pembroke College, frazzled from a trans-Atlantic trip that started in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s an unrecognized Prince Nicholas of Wales who carries her bags up to her third-floor room. Her first encounter involves a lame joke involving regal syphilis; a tiny towel and tampons feature in the second.

She doesn’t just live in the same dorm as Nick, but on the same floor. The other students are close friends of Nick and his family who protect the heir from over-eager wannabes in ways his personal protection officers can’t—to flush out disloyal hangers-on, they plant fake stories in order to see what makes it into the tabloids. Soon Bex is part of the club and discovers two of Nick’s secrets: he’s terrible at cryptic crosswords and prefers coffee over tea. At the time, he’s hiding in the bushes, avoiding the inevitable, unending glare of prying eyes.

The Fug Girls have empathy, but no pity, for princes like Nick, or the real William and Harry, who were born into their roles. “In Hollywood, you get people who seek the fame, seek the fortune,” Morgan says. “Kim Kardashian could have gone to University of California at Irvine and become a high school teacher. She wants this attention. [The princes] are going to get it whether they want it or not.”

Often, it’s a catch-22. As Nick explains: “I feel like I have to be so careful all the time. I have a non-hilarious conversation just once, and then the next day the papers write that I’m ‘Nick the Prick,’ because I wasn’t grinning like a madman. But if I’m having too much fun, I’m a drunken lout.”

When the romance starts getting serious, Lady Bollocks (officially Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe) lays down the law: “Nick is my friend, and I don’t want him going any further with someone naïve or unsuitable, or weak. So if you do not think you can handle it, step aside before it ends badly for both of you.”

Yet when the public find out, it’s Lady Bollocks, in full aristocratic commando mode, to the rescue. She orders Bex to stock up on basic dresses and skinny jeans as well and shred everything, lest it fall into wrong hands. She has to plaster a smile on her face, and not react when photographers yell, “Oi, nasty tart, look up,” from a few feet away.

It’s the myriad of small, perceptive, inventive details that make this romance such an enjoyable read. While the Middleton money comes from selling party planning supplies online, the Porters are far more uniquely American. Earl Porter made his fortune by inventing the Coucherator, a sofa with a built-in refrigerator. “It needed to be a bit tacky,” says Morgan. One of Bex and Nick’s best friends is Gaz, short for Garamond. His grandfather invented the typeface, so Gaz refuses to read anything in san serif.

It’s not all smooth sailing. Nick’s family life is a mess. His father is distant, while his mother, Emma, hasn’t been seen in public for years after having a complete mental break from reality. And Bex’s twin, Lacey, loves the attention, oblivious of the danger. The press is unrelenting. During a breakup, Bex tells Nick, “Being your girlfriend was temporary, but being your ex is for life.” Bex and Lacey are dubbed “Ivy League” by the tabloids because they are “attractive, creeping, climbing and pernicious.” (The Middletons were the “Wisteria Sisters” because they are “highly decorative and terribly fragrant with a ferocious ability to climb.”)

Laney makes the mistake of falling for Freddie, Nick’s only brother, who is Prince Harry in all but name. As the book explains, “Where the public is protective of Nick, it lusts for Freddie; it is Nick’s communal parent, but Freddie’s collective mistress, and I have never met a more gleeful rogue.” The authors admit to finding it hard to separate the real Prince Harry from his fictional doppelganger. “I did a whole comment on the website about Harry, and called him Freddie,” Cocks admits, “and had to delete it.”

Of course, there is a huge scandal, one that seems tame to readers but, in world obsessed with royalty, one that could haunt all involved with 20 years of nasty headlines. In the end, however, true love wins out for two kids who they have something rare. “We will forever be Nick and Bex,” the book concludes. “An unbreakable we, at last.”

Readers can only hope for a sequel. The authors have mused about recreating William and Kate’s recent trip to Australia and New Zealand. Or setting it in the wine country of Italy or France, where, no doubt, they would have to undertake copious amounts of research.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-royal-we-a-delicious-romp-of-a-royal-romance/feed/0Book review: One man’s dogged search for the number zerohttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/book-review-one-mans-dogged-search-for-the-number-zero/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/book-review-one-mans-dogged-search-for-the-number-zero/#commentsTue, 27 Jan 2015 00:50:10 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=668033One man's search for the oldest written example of the number zero on an ancient Cambodian artifact

FINDING ZERO: A MATHEMATICIAN’S ODYSSEY TO UNCOVER THE ORIGINS OF NUMBERS

Amir Aczel

Aczel is a mathematican who had an interesting nautical childhood—the subject of an earlier book, The Riddle of the Compass—that included a fascination with what we usually call the “Arabic numbers.” It is a well-justified fascination. The 10 digits introduced to the Latin world by Leonardo of Pisa might be the most successful cultural innovation of all time: There are holdouts against the Gregorian calendar, and rebels against “Western” musical tonality, but there are very few accountants anywhere using anything professionally but the shapes “1, 2, 3 . . .”

Leonardo didn’t invent the Arabic numerals, but neither did the Arabs who taught them to him. They are sometimes now called the “Hindu-Arabic” numbers by scholars, since the Arabs seem to have acquired them from India, but the oldest confirmed uses of the system stretch farther east, to Indochina. Which does not necessarily mean they weren’t an Indian invention.

The crucial innovation was not the particular shapes, which have mutated fantastically over the centuries, but the use of a distinct character for zero as a placeholder in the representation of natural numbers. Writing “805” or “3,000” eventually leads to zero as a concept, and only when that barrier is broken is the road open to higher abstractions—negative numbers, the Cartesian plane, and all that follows.

Aczel’s new book is a combination of scholarly monograph, personal memoir and ill-tamed philosophical essay that documents his search for an important object called K-127. K-127 is a stele, a freestanding stone with an inscription, from an ancient Cambodian temple complex at a place called Sambor. It mentions a year, “605 of the Çaka era,” that corresponds to 683 CE: The zero in the tens place of this inscription, represented in the Old Khmer script as a dot, is the oldest surviving written example. The stele was documented by a French antiquarian in 1931, and no one has doubted that it existed; but it is little-known, considering its importance, and no one was sure the item had survived the rule of the mad Khmer Rouge communists.

Aczel’s curiosity drove him to comb through the remnants of deliberately vandalized museums—the ruins of ruins—to try to find K-127. Along the way, he met corrupt officials and shady art dealers and talked math, sex and Eastern philosophy with holy men of various varieties. It’s a nice fish story about the legwork behind a small but significant piece of scholarship.

In the canon of literary vampires, there are really only two superstars: the original Count Dracula, created by Bram Stoker in 1897, and Lestat de Lioncourt, star of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. Beginning with 1976’s Interview with the Vampire, Rice’s series pretty much birthed the contemporary vampire craze, especially the notion of the creatures as beautiful and sensitive romantic leads. But while Stoker’s monster has never quite left us (see the new big-budget action flick Dracula: Unborn), Lestat has been lying dormant since 2003, when Anne Rice put a nail in her Chronicles to focus on a spiritual quest. In the decade that Rice spent writing about Christ and angels and the like, vampire storytelling exploded, fuelled by the extraordinary commercial success of Twilight and True Blood. It is into this territory that Rice and Lestat now return.

Set in the present day, Prince Lestat deals with the fallout of the revelation of the existence of vampires in modern society. When the first rule of bite club is don’t talk about bite club, how do you deal with a world that not only knows about you, but now has the technology to track your every move? Lestat himself is to blame, having published a tell-all autobiography. (Rice cleverly acknowledges her book Vampire Lestat in the narrative, a bit of monster meta.) And yet, it is Lestat who remains the greatest hope for a community under siege, not only from scientists out to exploit them, but from a mysterious, malevolent “Voice” compelling them to war. If he can finally use to learn email, that is.

Unlike some of Rice’s past novels, which were densely packed with historic details, Prince Lestat is epic without being impenetrable. It’s practically soap opera-like, briskly recapping 10 books’ worth of characters and clans, with plot twists that shake families and, of course, plenty of emotional turmoil, spiced with sex and death. It seems Rice set out not to make the next great vampire novel, but the next Game of Thrones.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/book-review-anne-rice-finally-gets-back-to-vampires/feed/0Book review: an unvarnished life of Aretha Franklinhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/book-review-an-unvarnished-life-of-aretha-franklin/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/book-review-an-unvarnished-life-of-aretha-franklin/#commentsSun, 26 Oct 2014 02:44:58 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=629067Warts and all, a comprehensive and accurate account of a life

Among elite R&B and blues artists, David Ritz has been the literary partner of choice for more than three decades, co-authoring memoirs by, among others, Smokey Robinson, Ray Charles, B.B. King, Etta James, R. Kelly, Natalie Cole and Janet Jackson. So it was hardly surprising when, in the late 1990s, Aretha Franklin called on Ritz to help shape what would become From These Roots. Never, Ritz quickly discovered, had he encountered so fervent a revisionist. Despite his protestations, Franklin steadfastly refused to face facts, instead fictionalizing an utterly charmed, carefree life.

Now, 15 years after the publication of that sugar-spun fantasy (which Franklin still stands by as gospel truth), Ritz is setting the record straight. Franklin, understandably, provided no co-operation. But siblings, managers, producers, mentors and peers spoke freely, braving her notoriously chilling wrath. The result, warts and all, is the most comprehensive and accurate account of Franklin yet published.

Unlike the majority of African-Americans in postwar Detroit, Franklin had a privileged upbringing. As her preacher father, Reverend C.L. Franklin, rose to national prominence in the 1950s, the preternaturally gifted Aretha became a star attraction at his New Bethel Baptist Church and on his cross-country tours, her gospel-singing prowess rivalling such greats as Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward (C.L.’s not-so-secret paramour). But Aretha’s youth wasn’t without challenges. Her parents separated when she was five and her mother died soon afterward. By age 15, Aretha was herself the mother of two sons, the identity of the fathers never made public. (Two more sons followed. Oddly, her children are largely absent from Ritz’s narrative.)

Her slow climb to superstardom began in 1960 when she signed with Columbia Records, where Legendary producer John Hammond attempted to shape her into a jazz and pop singer à la Dinah Washington. Her progress remained sluggish until 1967, when producer Jerry Wexler took her under his wing at Atlantic and the hits Respect, Chain of Fools, Think and Ain’t No Way gushed. By the late ’70s, the million-sellers had slowed to a trickle. She was repackaged by Arista’s majordomo Clive Davis as a slick, pop-oriented diva, enabling a brief, if creatively shallow, resurgence. She’s spent the decades since secluded in her Detroit mansion, performing and recording less and less, but still the uncontested Queen of Soul, with 18 Grammys and more than 75 million in worldwide sales.

While Ritz is clearly a devout fan, the portrait that takes shape is of a petulant, indolent, stubborn, suspicious, self-absorbed woman, dazzlingly gifted yet relentlessly discontent. Her success has had many architects—her father, brother Cecil, Hammond, Wexler, Davis, her long-suffering managers—all of whom emerge as more interesting, and more likable, than the monarch they’ve so dutifully served.

This tale of a 40-year-old widow living in an Irish hamlet in the late ’60s is a strangely mesmerizing literary triumph. What makes it so is the muted, masterful manner in which Tóibín articulates the mundane day-to-day trials of a woman grieving her husband’s death. But be forewarned: Nora Webster is a glacially paced, 373-page book whose major plot points include its middle-aged protagonist painting her living-room ceiling. Anyone who requires fiction to deliver high drama or modern bells and whistles is advised to walk away now.

The novel begins months after the death of Nora’s beloved husband, Maurice, a schoolteacher who left her with two young sons and two older daughters. Nora’s grief and money worries eclipse all at the outset, even her sons’ heartbreaking devastation, as she muddles through without him.

Throughout, Tóibín’s prose is as plain-spoken and unsentimental as his heroine; he deftly captures the rhythms and claustrophobia of small-town Irish life, a place of constant judgment. Nora, a prickly, fretful, and not always sympathetic character, fits right in; for her, repression is a virtue. When she visits her unhappy son at boarding school and refuses to take him home, modern parents will be baffled (children of Irish mothers, however, may not be).

As Nora slowly emerges as a formidable character able to stand up to the priests who put her son back a grade, and as she rediscovers her love of music, Tóibín’s narrative picks up. The focus on Nora’s interior world that gives the book a timeless quality at the outset then pans outward—referencing the moon landing and the Troubles. In time, Nora reconciles with the dead—“they would all take their turn in the world, shadows within shadows” and learns what it is to be alone: “It was not this solitude she had been going through, nor the moments when she felt his death like a shock to her system, as though she had been in a car accident, it was this wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted and all of it oddly pointless and confusing.” That Nora’s revelations seamlessly becomes the reader’s too is Tóibín’s triumph.

]]>Stars Between the Sun and Moon: One Woman’s Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom

Lucia Jang and Susan McClelland

The book’s subtitle suggests that this story has a happy ending, and in some ways it does. The prologue, too, refers to Jang’s eventual escape from North Korea, while also beginning to reveal how very fraught the journey to freedom was. Jang opens her memoir with a letter to her infant son as they await transport to South Korea from Mongolia (they would eventually move to Canada). “You were never supposed to live,” she writes. “There was a forest of people trying to prevent your coming into this world. Even my mother, my umma, wanted me to be rid of you.”

This heavy truth gives the reader pause to consider how happy an ending such a story can really have. As a young child in the 1970s, Sunhwa, the Korean name by which Jang refers to herself, was a loyal follower of North Korea’s “great father and eternal president,” Kim Il Sung, thanking him every time she passed his portrait in her family home. But her parents were not eligible to join the Communist party, due to her maternal grandfather’s misplacement of his membership papers during his service in the Korean War. This relegated the family to a life of poverty, hunger and shame.

When the famine of the 1990s set in, Sunhwa was separated from her abusive husband and heartbroken by the loss of her first baby, sold to a childless couple. She resolved to feed her parents by any means possible, making repeated illegal and perilous crossings into China, where she traded fish, clothes, and once a puppy, for rice. Eventually she was trafficked to a Chinese bachelor, and stayed in China for several years, sending food home to her parents, until she was deported and detained in North Korea’s notorious prison system, where disease, starvation and sexual violence loomed constantly.

Somehow, Sunhwa was never broken. She continued to defy the regime in her determination to save herself and her family. In prison, she began having dreams about a road lined with poplar trees and she “vowed to stay alive to discover the source of light at the end of the poplar trees.” Sunhwa seems to credit the force of this image with her survival but equally powerful was her own extraordinary compassion, which pushed her through her own suffering, striving to care for those she loved.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-harrowing-escape-from-north-korea/feed/0Book Review: Mansonhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/manson-the-life-and-times-of-charles-manson/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/manson-the-life-and-times-of-charles-manson/#commentsFri, 30 Aug 2013 06:37:00 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=416928Manson: The Life And Times Of Charles MansonBy Jeff Guinn
There have been a lot of bad Charles Manson books, and one great one, written by Manson’s prosecutor: Vincent…

There have been a lot of bad Charles Manson books, and one great one, written by Manson’s prosecutor: Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 Helter Skelter, history’s top-selling true-crime book. It is probably the right time for another try, and Jeff Guinn’s new account adds to our image of the L.A. crime spree that sounded the death knell of the ’60s. For starters, by taking a biographical approach, it detaches Manson somewhat from that context, showing how the Depression and the Second World War helped in various ways to form him.

There are few surprises in Manson’s upbringing, detailed carefully here with family interviews for the first time. His single mother did some prison time early in his life and could not keep him out of juvenile reformatories practically designed to turn him into a con artist. This involved alternate helpings of prison rape and trendy self-help literature; Guinn documents Manson’s controversial, but relevant, participation in Scientology and Dale Carnegie seminars. Manson, it is important to remember, is not known to have killed anybody personally. His ability to impress and dominate people, refined by years of literally surviving on his wits, hit California like a weaponized bacillus.

Guinn’s version corrects the most important weakness of Helter Skelter by revealing just how close Manson and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson became. Bugliosi left music-industry people out of his book almost completely, but here, the Manson murders come off almost as an out-of-control end result of Charlie’s pursuit of a recording career. He came so close (Neil Young praised his guitar-improvisation skills) that one can almost imagine an alternative history in which the Charles Milles Manson of 2013 is a minor ’70s pop star and beloved hippie eccentric, instead of a wretched old murderer dying slowly in jail. Guinn’s Manson does not make for as good a book as Helter Skelter, but it might be a better primer for younger readers on one of the 20th century’s defining criminal cases.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/macleans-book-reviews-and-bestsellers-3/feed/0The Silence Of Animals: On Progress And Other Modern Mythshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-silence-of-animals-on-progress-and-other-modern-myths/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-silence-of-animals-on-progress-and-other-modern-myths/#commentsFri, 12 Jul 2013 18:00:00 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=404058Book by John Gray

]]>For a variety of sometimes contradictory reasons, Gray has a considerable popular footprint—extraordinarily large for a philosopher—especially in his native Britain. He writes beautifully and accessibly about real-world issues. He is preposterously familiar with the works of almost forgotten writers. He is an atheist who is sympathetic to religion, at least as long as the faith keeps its quest for meaning and human perfectibility safely on the far side of the grave. For if there is anything Gray despises, it is Western civilization’s long history of utopian thinking, a tendency now mostly secular, having migrated from Christian millenarianism to, first, the revolutionary Left (Jacobeans, Leninists) and lately to the political Right (the neo-liberal invaders of Iraq). Put into action, the belief in human progress, in Gray’s vision, always ends in a mound of corpses. It forgets or ignores that we are and always will be animals, prone to descend into barbarism in an eye blink. Except he wouldn’t think of it as a descent—more a sideways shuffle, shedding civilizational veneer as we go.

The full Gray is on display in his slender new volume. Gray quotes extensively from British intelligence officer Norman Lewis’s account of hunger- and disease-ravaged Naples after its 1943 “liberation” and from English falcon-obsessive J.A. Baker’s 1967 classic The Peregrine. The former leads into a numbing compilation of human behaviour during terrible times: we are only “intermittently” rational, the record shows, “and the idea that Jesus returned from the dead is not as contrary to reason as the notion that human beings will in future be different from how they have always been.”

The latter, via Baker’s 10-year immersion in the life of the peregrine—an immersion in the silence of animals, untroubled by the inner conflicts, dreams and drives of humanity—points to Gray’s ideal of godless contemplation. It’s not much: contemplation provides neither meaning to existence (for there is none) or more than a momentary respite from the need for meaning. But it is a respite, and all that we can ask for.

]]>“For every biographer or scholar who believes Zelda derailed Scott’s life, [there] is one who believes Scott ruined Zelda’s,” writes the author of this new book on the real-life Fitzgeralds.

Z—which is based on real events but takes plenty of artistic licence—opens in 1918, seven years before the publication of The Great Gatsby cemented F. Scott Fitzgerald’s place in the 20th-century literary canon. Scott, then a dashing young army lieutenant, arrives in Alabama—where he soon falls for a 17-year-old belle with a healthy dose of impishness. Against the wishes of Zelda’s hidebound parents, Scott and Zelda wed and set off for the jazz-fuelled streets of New York City.

The rest of the book follows the slow collapse of that marriage. Yes, there are periods of success and elation—usually celebrated over stiff cocktails with the likes of Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway (whom Zelda deplores). But in the end, misery wins out. Scott is blighted by tepid book reviews and a love of the bottle. Zelda spends her 30s in “sanitariums” for the mentally disturbed.

Parts of the novel can feel cheesy and contrived. At times, Fowler’s descriptions are overly expository—as if she is too eager to squeeze in biographical detail. But Gatsby devotees will find much to like about Z’s rich, if ambivalent, portrayal of Scott. “Depending on who you ask,” Zelda muses in a diary entry, “Scott’s either a misunderstood genius or a pathetic son of a bitch.”

As to the question of who ruined whose life, by the end of Z, Fowler’s Zelda is revealed as a tragic figure: a talented mind whose spirit is tethered and whose ambition is crushed by a husband who loves her absolutely but will not let her thrive.

Visit the Maclean’sBookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

]]>American firefighter and author Zac Unger always wanted to be an eco-adventure warrior who would save the polar bears from extinction and reverse climate change. But after shadowing a few polar bear experts and having his beliefs about environmental activism upended, he instead wrote this hilarious book about the process of becoming disillusioned in Churchill, Man.

The way into the story is Unger’s concern about the bears’ struggle to survive the Arctic’s increasingly long summers, before they can head out onto the ice to hunt seals, their only source of sustenance. But what if seals weren’t the bears’ only food? What if they could adapt to survive by adding geese, eggs, berries, starfish and even caribou to their diet? Unger didn’t want to know. He wanted to worship the celebrity scientists of the environmental movement who refused to entertain anything other than a doomsday prophecy.

Then he met “Rocky”—Robert Rockwell, a population biologist. Rockwell planted in Unger a kernel of doubt about the math used in polar bear population projections. To investigate the conflict, Unger took his wife and three children to the polar bear hub of the world for tourist season.

Nothing is safe from Unger’s comedic assault, including his own man crushes. Churchill’s portly residents are shown no mercy, and neither are the tourists, among them a racist Saskatchewan farmer. There are vivid portraits of the public relations flacks, bear wranglers and earnest activists who enliven the town. It’s a circus, and Unger treats it accordingly. Ruefully he notes that actual bear watching is a poor substitute for watching a show about bears on television.

The commercial bear scene in Churchill, he concludes, is just adrenalin tourism masquerading as environmental activism. But Unger knows the last thing the polar bear movement needs is another shrill voice. His book—breezy and disarming—is barely recognizable as an issue book. It’s that funny. But it kinda sneeks up on you, just like a polar bear.

Visit the Maclean’sBookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

]]>Wheelan’s earlier book, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science, is regarded as one of the best—and most readable—introductory texts on the subject. A former U.S. correspondent for The Economist who now teaches at Dartmouth College, Wheelan skilfully cut through all the jargon and graphs to demonstrate that economics is really about people and their behaviour. Now Wheelan is attempting to demystify another important, but equally tedious-sounding field: statistics. As Wheelan points out, the inferences made from statistical data underpin much of modern life, from the movie suggestions delivered by Netflix to your chances of developing heart disease. They are also easily misunderstood, manipulated or, in rare cases, plain wrong. But how many of us know enough about stats to tell?

In a bid to explain both the power and pitfalls of statistical analyses, Wheelan draws on engaging examples that range from sports to game shows. They include: why marketers of Schlitz beer were willing to subject their brew to a blind taste test among 100 fans of a rival brand in front of a Super Bowl audience (most beers Schlitz competes with taste the same and, with a large enough sample size, roughly half of tasters were likely to pick Schlitz regardless of their stated preference); and a discussion of what’s come to be known as the Monty Hall problem: should Let’s Make a Deal contestants, faced with three doors, one of which hides a car and two that hide goats, opt to change their selection after the host reveals a goat behind one of the two doors they didn’t pick? (Yes, Wheelan argues, because the chances of winning jump from one-in-three to two-in-three.)

Still, the book feels far more dense and textbook-like than Wheelan’s previous work. It may well be that, unlike economics, which is sometimes described as a “pseudoscience,” statistics is necessarily more math-like. But given the increasing importance of stats to our everyday lives, odds are it’s worth the extra effort.

Visit the Maclean’sBookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/charles-wheelan-2/feed/0Review: On the Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Lookshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/on-the-map-a-mind-expanding-exploration-of-the-way-the-world-looks/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/on-the-map-a-mind-expanding-exploration-of-the-way-the-world-looks/#commentsFri, 01 Feb 2013 15:00:00 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=344706By Simon Garfield

]]>A British journalist, Garfield had a 2010 hit with Just My Type, a book about typefaces. (Before his big break he wrote good books about William Huskisson, the British politician remembered chiefly as the first person ever killed in a railway accident, and William Perkin, the dyemaker who accidentally revolutionized synthetic colour and became the first individual to get rich from chemistry.) On the Map, a compendium of anecdotes and reporting about the history of cartography, makes for a natural and satisfying follow-up. The illustrations, as one would expect, are especially delightful.

Garfield observes that his book arrives at a strange moment in the story of the map. We can now pull our location out of the ether at will, and look at made-to-order electronic maps of any place, asking for whatever degree of detail and abstractness we like. Google has, as one of its hundred little-noticed alterations of our neurology, integrated street-level photography with the traditional map. It might not be long before the two-dimensional map is altogether displaced from our consciousness. Perhaps modern “scientific” maps will become unfamiliar, like the allegorical maps of the medieval world with their dragons and sea monsters and religious symbols.

But with what effects? A Memorial University of Newfoundland humanities prof recently went public with data suggesting that many undergraduates cannot find Europe or the Atlantic Ocean (!) on a map without help. Does this imply, as one suspects, that much of the content of newspapers and history books is gibberish to these young people? Is it because paper maps have flown upward out of their lives into an electronic cloud? Older authors and editors—who themselves missed out on the excruciating geography drills their parents endured in school—may wish to study On the Map when considering how to help the Google-ized generation make sense of the physical world.

Visit the Maclean’sBookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/on-the-map-a-mind-expanding-exploration-of-the-way-the-world-looks/feed/0REVIEW: The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern Warhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-verdict-of-battle-the-law-of-victory-and-the-making-of-modern-war/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-verdict-of-battle-the-law-of-victory-and-the-making-of-modern-war/#commentsFri, 19 Oct 2012 14:10:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=304329By James Q. Whitman

An eminent law professor at Yale, Whitman offers a provocative argument against the idea that modern Western laws and practices of war represent a vast improvement over earlier models. Eighteenth-century war, despite practices we now find repulsive—victorious troops would kill off enemy wounded and loot their corpses—was in many ways more civilized. A battle was a lawful means of settling a dispute (and gaining spoils), and its verdict was accepted by the losers. Now war has lost all legitimacy, and can only be undertaken in the direst circumstances of self-defence and/or fought for the loftiest of moral aims. The result is bloody conflicts that seemingly have no end, and a breakdown in the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. What modern war needs is more pragmatic dickering over the spoils of war—which tends to preserve both life and property—and fewer human-rights lawyers involved, Whitman writes: “Wars enter their most dangerous territory when they aim to remake the world, and the same is true of lawyers.”

The history Whitman provides is eye-opening. When battles really did decide the fate of nations, they were often observed by battle tourists. First Bull Run, the opening salvo of the American Civil War, brought out Washington society, accompanied by servants bearing picnic baskets. Henri Dunant famously founded the Red Cross because of the suffering he witnessed after the battle of Solferino in 1859, fought between a French-Italian alliance and the Austrian Empire. Yet Dunant, a Swiss neutral, was there partly as a tourist, to witness history in the making.

At Sedan in 1870, the tide began to turn. Prussia scored a decisive victory over France, and the French emperor laid his sword before the Prussian king. But the French refused their emperor’s surrender, and carried on the conflict. The struggle was no longer between king and emperor, or even between their armies, but between the German and French nations. The stage was set for the total wars of modern times, with their starvation blockades and aerial bombing campaigns, more deadly than battles.

]]>Anxiety has always been comedy gold—just ask Woody Allen. Or Smith, for that matter, whose sweat-soaked descriptions of his panic attacks are appallingly funny: walking to his therapist’s Boston office, he can argue himself into the certainty of his onrushing “death by prostitution” in mere seconds. (“I am anxious . . . so I can’t concentrate . . . so I will make an unforgivable mistake at work . . . I will be fired . . . I will be forced to have sex for money in an alley behind Fenway Park . . . I will contract HIV . . . ”) Whether or not anxiety is the disorder of modern life, as Smith argues, it is a particularly sharp torture for the imaginative.

For all its high entertainment value—Smith’s tales of sticking sweat pads in his armpits to stem a flow that rivalled Albert Brooks’s in Broadcast News, or of how he lost his virginity in a way “even my most depraved friends find unfortunate” (to a middle-aged woman with a predilection for teen boys)—Monkey Mind is at its best demonstrating how anxiety short-circuits rational thought.

Smith takes his title from the Buddhist term for the anxious state. A person with monkey mind might as well have a head full of screaming, bouncing, feces-flinging simians, “swinging from loose neurons like howlers from vines”—Smith in the throes of an attack. In his obsessive search for root causes, he goes to his brother, Scott—a fellow sufferer, albeit in a more physical way (a hypochondriac)—with the tale of how he, Daniel, lost his virginity. Has Daniel forgotten, asks his wide-eyed brother, that he and Scott are the sons of a woman who calls herself the Queen of Anxiety and a father who was hospitalized in his 40s after a series of panic attacks?

Eventually, by giving up on the search for why his mind is sometimes engulfed in flames and concentrating instead on putting the fire out—cognitive therapy, in short—Smith now exerts much more control over his life. He’s far from cured, but learning how to fight has made all the difference.

]]>In American history there are few examples more stark of the carnage that a toxic brew of guns, alcohol, exaggerated notions of personal honour and profound stupidity can wreak than the infamous 19th-century Hatfield-McCoy feud. Alther, a bestselling novelist with a distant connection to the McCoy side, tells the entire mind-numbing story. Simmering anger over the murder of a Union McCoy soldier by a Confederate Hatfield in 1865 exploded in 1878 after the McCoys accused a Hatfield of stealing a hog. His acquittal set off a cycle of violent retribution that killed more than a dozen before it ended in 1890. But two factors in Alther’s book raise it above a tabloid retelling, one being the historical context she provides.

The war between Hatfields and McCoys became universally known because its Civil War resonance and the legal issues it raised—the U.S. Supreme Court had to decide whether it was legal for a posse from Kentucky (home of the McCoys) to seize a group of Hatfields from their West Virginia homes—led to a wildly popular book. It in turn inspired 92 silent films about rampaging hillbilly killers, entrenching the feud in American pop culture. (Star Trek’s irascible Dr. McCoy traces his ancestry to one side.)

There were other Appalachian feuds, though, all rooted in the same “Corsican” culture—as the big-city press put it at the time —of personal honour and subsistence farming. One, between the Baker and White families, lasted 95 years, from 1806 to 1901, and involved the murder of the governor-elect of Kentucky in 1900, not to mention somewhere between 100 and 150 others. In a mere three years (1884 to 1887) the Martin-Tolliver feud killed 20 and wounded 16.

The other striking aspect of Blood Feud is subtler, dispiriting, and never explicitly put forward by Alther, but emerges clearly from her exposition of events: the practical value of unhesitating violence. It was the born killers, the ones unhampered by moral qualms or a belief in the legal system, who showed the highest survival rates.

]]>Cleave is fearless about tackling women’s voices, and finding the bright spots embedded in calamity. In his first novel, Incendiary, he reinvents the life of a mother who loses her son and husband to an act of terrorism. Little Bee, his wildly successful second book, describes the life of a Nigerian woman seeking asylum in England. With this equally ambitious novel, Cleave is going for gold with a widescreen, action-packed story that explores two emotional extremes: the life of a professional athlete determined to win at any cost, and the experience of parents caring for a gravely ill child.

Zoe and Kate meet as 19-year-old cyclists who share an aging coach. Zoe is a driven party girl while Kate is the sensible one who feels a bit guilty when she wins. Their goal is to compete in the London Olympics. But when Kate falls in love with another gold-seeking cyclist, she discovers how motherhood can mess with the singlemindedness their sport demands. The fact their daughter has leukemia only raises the stakes higher, in a novel where conflict and consequence pile up like sweaty riders in a peloton. Looking after a very sick child, Cleave writes, is “the Olympics of parenting.” The theme of personal ambition vs. parental demands feels as timely as the feat of synchronizing the novel to this summer’s games in London. He overestimates the sort of media frenzy that would focus on a female cyclist, though. Or is that just a familiarity with London tabloid culture talking? (Cleave was a long-time columnist for the Guardian newspaper.)

“I like to tell stories about a world that hasn’t yet cooled,” Cleave has said, and his fiction does have a deeply researched journalistic immediacy. He writes with great tenderness about children. But Kate and Zoe too often behave as if they are in a movie—as they no doubt soon will be. The language is by turns brilliant and overamped. (“Rain lashed her face and she opened her mouth, liking the untamed taste of it.”) There’s more than a soupçon of Harlequin here—and that’s just the way his millions of readers like it.

]]>Carey’s new novel reads like a dream, and not just for its literary virtuosity. On the surface, it seems to be the story of a nerdy spinster with a secret life—and a torrid love affair. But as she copes with a heartbreaking loss in a most unconventional manner, the book’s deeper and more universal themes emerge: our love-hate relationship with technology, our inability to comprehend death, our see-sawing needs for intimacy and autonomy.

Not that Carey indulges in such psychobabble. He’s too busy doing a seamless job linking the narratives of unlikely soulmates Catherine Gehrig and Henry Brandling. Catherine lives in modern-day London and works as a curator at a museum with a “world-famous collection of clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up machines.” When she discovers that her married lover, Matthew, has dropped dead of a heart attack, Catherine is faced with the near impossible task of hiding her grief at work. (Matthew was also her colleague.) Then the department head sequesters her in a tightly guarded annex where a unique assignment awaits—the reconstruction of a massive automated duck.

It is thus that Catherine comes across Henry, via journals he kept some 150 years earlier, when he left his consumptive son and adulterous wife and set off for Germany to have the duck built in the hopes that it might “agitate” young Percy enough to keep him alive. The scheme is out of character—Henry is more timid than intrepid and has a limited imagination—but he is so desperate to save his son that he surrenders his project to a shady ensemble of characters who bombard him with mystical notions about science and fate.

Catherine similarly prefers fact to fancy—she once thought “clockmaking must still any turmoil in one’s breast.” But as she mourns Matthew, she finds herself horrified by machines—robots that keep autistic children company, tanks that explode in the sea, even the decaying human body. In the end, her only solace comes from a fellow skeptic of a former century and the brave and messy journey he takes to mend his own broken heart.

]]>Fans of Kurlansky will recognize the name Birdseye, a man mentioned in three of the author’s earlier works. Clarence Birdseye was an American original—a college dropout and adventurer who died in 1956 with over 200 patents to his name. The advances he made in frozen food processing changed the way we distributed food as society became urbanized. If the history of frozen food doesn’t sound fun, you’ve underestimated Kurlansky. He has a gift for turning dry topics (salt, cod) into narrative gold. This biography is packed with swashbuckling tales of a curious man who made a fortune betting on his own ingenuity.

First, Kurlansky defends Birdseye’s legacy from today’s locavores, who probably view the “father of frozen food” as the Antichrist. Kurlansky does this by explaining that Birdseye’s fast freezing process was welcome in a world of canned, salted, smoked or slow-frozen food. As Birdseye’s life story unfolds, we meet a voracious hunter, an entrepreneurial fur trader and heroic researcher who tried to cure Rocky Mountain spotted fever in Montana. Next, he took his bride and new baby to the wilds of Labrador, where he marvelled at the Inuits’ ability to flash-freeze their fish. In 1924, he perfected and patented a mechanized process called multiplate freezing, then sold it for $23.5 million just before the Depression. Birdseye then turned his attention to improving portable freezers and food dehydration machines. Always juggling several pursuits, he formed a light bulb company, where he designed a brighter filament and created a built-in reflector. Angina slowed him down, but didn’t stop him from inventing a new process for making paper and writing a book about gardening. He died at age 68.

Inside this book lies a wonderful mini-bio of a medical missionary, Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, and an impassioned short history of ice. This reader bets ice is the topic of Kurlansky’s next big book. Avid poker player Birdseye would be the first to take that bet.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-birdseye-the-adventures-of-a-curious-man/feed/0REVIEW: Squeeze this!: a cultural history of the accordion in Americahttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-squeeze-this-a-cultural-history-of-the-accordion-in-america/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-squeeze-this-a-cultural-history-of-the-accordion-in-america/#commentsTue, 22 May 2012 20:50:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=259000Book by Marion Jacobson

]]>As musical instruments go, the accordion is an odd duck. It has both bellows and buttons, reeds and keys. It’s cumbersome but designed to be portable. It’s stylistically versatile, but its sound stands out in any ensemble. Its detractors are legion, but even its proponents disagree: is it the homely instrument of the common folk, or a testament to human ingenuity and a vehicle for self-improvement?

Jacobson, an ethnomusicologist who started playing the accordion in Brooklyn 10 years ago, has a convert’s zeal and a scholar’s erudition. Her book is an academic resource, a detailed history, and a quirky travelogue through U.S. folk festivals. Though its prose may strike a few bum notes, it tells us how the story of the accordion echoes and amplifies aspects of American history.

Squeezed in between a dense beginning and a rambling last chapter are a number of thought-provoking insights and mini-biographies. Jacobson takes us from the instrument’s 19th-century genesis in Austria and Italy to its early 20th-century arrival on American shores, then through the development of the “accordion industrial complex.” She details its early-1950s heyday, its precipitous decline after the rise of the guitar, and finally its resurrection of sorts among Brooklyn hipsters, San Francisco devotees and alternative rock bands across the country.

Jacobson’s narrative suggests how capitalism helps shape cultural identity, as early accordion schools and sheet-music companies promoted original folk tunes to working-class children of immigrant families. She explains how the accordion has established itself as at once Czech-American, German-American, Italian-American, Scandinavian-American, and Mexican-American—and how more recently it has become an outsider’s instrument of self-definition. Time, then, to roll out the barrel and uncork the champagne: with this book, the lowly squeezebox has begun to get its cultural due.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-squeeze-this-a-cultural-history-of-the-accordion-in-america/feed/1REVIEW: Darwin’s devices: what evolving robots can teach us about the history of life and the future of technologyhttp://www.macleans.ca/general/review-what-evolving-robots-can-teach-us-about-the-history-of-life-and-the-future-of-technology/
http://www.macleans.ca/general/review-what-evolving-robots-can-teach-us-about-the-history-of-life-and-the-future-of-technology/#commentsThu, 10 May 2012 14:23:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=256472Book by John Long

]]>Why are blue marlin faster than tuna? This innocuous question sets Vassar College biologist Long off on a meandering investigation through evolution, robotics and, eventually, the future of warfare.

Long’s observations on the differing swimming speeds of marlin and tuna lead him to wonder how the characteristics of a species’ spinal column could affect their evolutionary prospects. Unfortunately, questions about evolution are easier to come by than answers: a single scientist is rarely able to compile enough data over a lifetime to make conclusive pronouncements. Long decides to speed up this process using robots.

Picking a species of tadpole larvae as their test subjects, Long and his research team construct a series of swimming machines called Tadros. These simple mechanical beings look like floating plastic pots with tails; a photo sensor and some circuitry directs the tail to swim toward light—behaviour that is meant to mimic the search for food. The scientists vary the characteristics of the Tadros’ tail and award points based on the ability to swim efficiently and move quickly toward a food source.

Calculations about the first generation allows the scientists to select the fittest Tadros. These characteristics are then “bred” into subsequent generations constructed in the lab. And so on. After several generations, Long figures the results should reveal the impact of evolution on spine length and stiffness. For added realism, predators are later added to the mix. Things are rarely simple or easy in Long’s quest, but he eventually comes to some intriguing conclusions about the efficacy of robotic discovery, and how the military could incorporate robots into the business of war. (His research is partly funded by the U.S. Navy.)

Long’s trials, errors and successes should prove enlightening to anyone interested in evolution or the future of robotics. Casual readers should be warned, however. The discussion can get quite technical (be prepared for terms such as cycloptic helical klinotaxis) and Long’s determination to name every colleague or grad student who ever helped slows down the narrative.

]]>Foreigners, even foreign devotees—and they have been legion over the centuries—find The Classic of Changes fundamentally hard to engage with. Everywhere else among the world’s great civilizations, the foundational texts—the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Popol Vuh—are fundamentally narratives. They explain, or at least describe, ultimate reality via a storyline about the aims and actions of God (or the gods). Not the I Ching, the ancient Chinese text that Smith, following the current Pinyin transliteration system, usually renders as the Yijing. Taking shape about 3,000 years ago, the Yijing consists of 64 six-line symbols, all distinguished from one another by their pattern of solid (—) and broken (- -) lines. The first two hexagrams, for example, are Qian (six unbroken horizontal lines) and Kun (six broken lines). The other 62 are permutations of the first two.

From the outside looking in, hexagrams make pretty thin gruel for crafting a story, our species’ default means of making sense of otherwise random forces and events. But for millennia the Chinese, from emperors to peasants, have seen the book of nature writ clear in the Yijing’s lines. They have ceaselessly plumbed it to understand natural cycles of ebb and flow—crucial information for a culture in which, as Smith notes, the ideal has always been “to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right place, facing the right direction.” And just as entire libraries of theological tomes have followed upon four thin Christian Gospels, over time the hexagrams have spawned the narrative elements they required—names, brief descriptions of what they represented and commentaries.

Ever since the Han Dynasty declared the Yijing a Confucian classic in 136 BCE, it has infused not just Chinese art but science as well. Today Chinese scholars see relationships between the hexagrams and atomic structure, the patterns of the human genome and the eight-tier matrix of linear algebra. Their Western influence has stretched from Carl Jung’s psychology to I.M. Pei’s architecture. As Smith demonstrates, in a rather premature “biography,” the Yijing remains vibrantly alive.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-the-i-ching-a-biography/feed/0REVIEW: Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific crest trailhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-from-lost-to-found-on-the-pacific-crest-trail/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-from-lost-to-found-on-the-pacific-crest-trail/#commentsWed, 09 May 2012 15:28:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=256480Book by Cheryl Strayed

]]>At 22, Strayed loses her mother to cancer. She struggles to cope as her family drifts apart. Her own marriage crumbles. She goes through a string of bad affairs and dead-end waitressing jobs, and dabbles in heroin. At 26, feeling she has nothing left to lose, Strayed decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, shrinking her life down to what she describes as a path “two feet wide and 2,663 miles long.” Wild is her memoir.

When Strayed steps onto the trail, in the spring of 1995, she’s never done a long distance hike before, and it shows: her pack is so heavy she can barely lift it. (She names it “Monster.”) “I was alone in the wilderness with a beast of a load to carry,” she writes. After a fellow hiker helps pare down her possessions—she gets rid of a foldable saw, a box of condoms, and a giant camera flash—Monster becomes a little more manageable.

Strayed encounters rattlesnakes, bears, and every weather condition from deep snow to scorching heat; she copes with the mundane pitfalls of hiking, like unappetizing camp food, or a wet sleeping bag. And she revels in the beauty of the wilderness around her, in the relationships she builds with other hikers she meets, and in her own solitude. When she finishes at the Bridge of the Gods, between Washington and Oregon, she’s reached no real conclusions about what to do next, but it seems to be enough to trust whatever brought her there. She spends her last $2 on an ice cream cone.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-from-lost-to-found-on-the-pacific-crest-trail/feed/1REVIEW: Why Spencer Perceval had to die: the assassination of a British Prime Ministerhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-why-spencer-perceval-had-to-die-the-assassination-of-a-british-prime-minister/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-why-spencer-perceval-had-to-die-the-assassination-of-a-british-prime-minister/#commentsTue, 08 May 2012 18:19:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=256478Book by Andro Linklater

]]>Perceval, the only British prime minister ever assassinated, is known today simply for being gunned down in the lobby of the House of Commons 200 years ago, on May 11, 1812. But Linklater, despite not much liking the victim, makes a convincing case that Perceval deserves to be remembered for far more, that he was a singularly important prime minister, a man, so to speak, well worth shooting. As for the hapless but oddly sympathetic killer, Liverpool businessman John Bellingham, he too has a story worth recording.

Linklater draws a parallel between the assassinations of Perceval and John F. Kennedy: both died in the midst of heightened international tensions (the Cold War for JFK, the long Napoleonic wars for Perceval), and both deaths threw their leaderless governments into panic mode. The author only draws the parallel, however, to highlight a crucial point of difference: Americans reacted with grief to the president’s murder, while tens of thousands of Britons greeted the prime minister’s killing with “the most savage expressions of joy and exultation,” in the words of an alarmed opposition MP.

Perceval was an iron-willed evangelical Christian not above using political guile and dictatorial methods to further his two passions: ending the slave trade and carrying on the struggle against Napoleon—two eventual victories that owe a lot to him. But in the process he wreaked economic devastation, nowhere more acutely than in Liverpool, home to the British slave trade and to John Bellingham. The assassin was no slaver, but a would-be Baltic trader who had been ruined in Russia and failed to gain compensation from his own government. His derangement was real but subtle. At his trial Bellingham tried to explain (rather like Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik two centuries later) that he was not guilty of a crime, for he was acting in the interests of justice. The same couldn’t have been said by those who aided Bellingham—and Linklater shows that someone was supporting him—with money that proved well spent. Many of Perceval’s economic measures were quickly dismantled after his death.

]]>If American journalist Beinart wasn’t Jewish, it’s likely that his new book might be carelessly mistaken for run-of-the-mill anti-Semitism. Which is precisely Beinart’s point: criticism of Israeli policy, he argues, is too often labelled anti-Semitic by the Israeli and American-Jewish establishments. It’s a reality that prevents Jews from recognizing modern Israel for what it truly is: a rapidly receding democracy. The ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank and the occupation of Gaza are, in Beinart’s view, totally antithetical to the liberal Zionism championed by Israel’s founding fathers. He believes that without liberal Zionism, Israel is morally defunct, and without morals, Israel’s survival is not guaranteed.

Beinart is extremely critical of the Netanyahu government, and what he considers its hypocritical stance on social justice: “Israel’s leaders defend the Jewish state against international isolation by invoking its liberal democratic character,” he writes, even though “their own policies are eroding it.” Unfortunately, Beinart is no stranger to hypocrisy himself. He rails on about stock victim rhetoric recycled from the Holocaust and its crippling effect on modern Jewry—“we need a new American-Jewish story, built around this basic truth: we are not history’s permanent victims.” Yet the basis for his Zionism, and his passion for a healthy, democratic Jewish state, is victimhood itself: “As a Zionist, I believe that after two millennia of homelessness, the Jewish people deserve a state dedicated to their protection in their historic land.”

In the world according to Beinart, then, American Jewry should base its identity on the “truth” that they are not history’s permanent victims, and at the same time, justify Israel’s existence on the reality that they are. It’s hard to swallow, to say the least. Or as one rabbi, Ammiel Hirsch, blogged in the Huffington Post recently, The Crisis of Zionism poses some “interesting questions for an academic thesis.” But, Hirsch says, it’s “hardly a serious political proposal.”

]]>Between 2004 and 2010, few people spent more time with Tiger Woods than his swing coach, Hank Haney. After hours on the driving range, day after day, teacher and student would spend hours more inside Tiger’s Florida mansion, dissecting their sessions. Many nights, Haney stayed for supper. “When we were watching television after dinner, he’d sometimes go to the refrigerator to get a sugar-free popsicle,” he writes. “But he never offered me one or ever came back with one.”

In those days, of course, Tiger was still the god of golf, his serial sex addiction a closely guarded secret. Haney insists he had no idea that his star pupil was leading a double life. But in hindsight, those popsicles offered a tiny clue. “It was that quality of paying attention only to his own needs that was so central to his ability to win,” Haney continues. “Winning gave him permission to remain a flawed and in some ways immature person.”

Haney is hardly perfect, either. Once a core member of Tiger’s inner circle, he chose to write his tell-all memoir only after Woods’s world collapsed—and to release it during Masters week, the biggest tournament of the year. And at times, he seems even more petty and self-absorbed than his former friend, poring through stats to prove that he was the best coach Woods ever had. “He’s become less of a golfer,” Haney concludes, “and he’s never going to be the same again.”

Still, for those who can’t read enough about Tiger’s fall from glory, there is plenty. Woods was a famously terrible tipper who thought “it was funny to be cheap.” He was obsessed with the U.S. Navy SEALs, so much so that he may have suffered his most serious knee injury while training with the elite special forces unit. And in 2006, while rooming with fellow tour pro Zach Johnson—a devout Christian—Tiger found it amusing to order the hotel’s 24-hour porn station. “It was so funny watching him acting like everything was normal,” Woods later told Haney. “I got him pretty good.” With his book, Haney has done the same.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-big-miss-my-years-coaching-tiger-woods/feed/0REVIEW: True North: A Life in the Music Businesshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/true-north-a-life-in-the-music-business/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/true-north-a-life-in-the-music-business/#commentsMon, 23 Apr 2012 15:22:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=253159Book by Bernie Finkelstein

]]>Talk about a coming of age. In 1966, Bernie Finkelstein was a 21-year-old pothead managing the Paupers, a psychedelic rock band from Toronto’s Yorkville. On his first plane trip, he flew to New York and got them a U.S. record contract and a club date. But he turned down an offer to share a bill with Canadian folk stars Ian & Sylvia, instead choosing to open for an unknown San Francisco group, the Jefferson Airplane. By the time the gig rolled around, in 1967, the Airplane was the band of the moment and the New York show was its East Coast debut. The Paupers blew away an audience that included Paul Simon, Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Bob Dylan manager Albert Grossman. The next morning, a blond with two joints in her hand knocked on Finkelstein’s door and offered to photograph the band for free. It was Linda Eastman, Paul McCartney’s future wife. Later that week, Finkelstein met Grossman at his home and got scarily stoned while transfixed by an Andy Warhol portrait of Elvis. The next day at Grossman’s office, the two men agreed to co-manage the Paupers—and Bernie met Bob Dylan on his way out.

Despite the Cinderella story, the Paupers never made it big. But after retreating to Toronto, Finkelstein went on to found True North, one of Canada’s most successful indie record labels—home to Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan, Dan Hill and Rough Trade. And with Bernie Fiedler, his management partner for a decade, he helped pioneer the Canadian music business, and the CanCon rules that nurtured it. True North is a modest, candid and lively memoir. By the time he sold his record label, it had released over 500 albums, 40 of them gold or platinum, and won 50 Junos. But Finkelstein insists he never cared about the money, only the music. A true Canadian, he lets his failures shine as brightly as his triumphs.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/true-north-a-life-in-the-music-business/feed/0REVIEW: When I was a child I read bookshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-when-i-was-a-child-i-read-books/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/review-when-i-was-a-child-i-read-books/#commentsThu, 19 Apr 2012 14:21:50 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=251904Book by Marilynne Robinson

]]>One of the most acclaimed, if least prolific (three novels in 28 years) novelists in America, Robinson, 68, is also a wonderful essayist. It is no criticism of her—quite the contrary—to note that she writes like someone from another era. And not just because her early schooling, like that of many people her age (or even younger), seems to more resemble something out of Dickens than contemporary children’s education. In the title essay of her new collection, Robinson writes that the bookshelves of northern Idaho, where she grew up, groaned with “old and thick and hard” tomes about such subjects as “Constantinople, the Cromwell revolution and chivalry,” books that allowed her to “experience that much underrated thing called deracination, the meditative, free appreciation of whatever comes under one’s eyes,” without concern over its relevance or whether it properly pertained to her tribe.

Robinson despises identity politics in general, and U.S. politics in particular, the work of two parties who agree, she writes, that capitalism has always been their country’s sole animating force and, even more dispiritingly, whether they’re for it or not, that capitalism is best understood as pure grasping materialism. “Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word ‘soul,’ ” she notes, a loss not only to religion—Robinson is a Congregationalist—but in “literature, political thought and every humane pursuit.” For “call it self or call it soul,” everything moral that matters is felt, expressed or decided at the individual level, governed by our “unaccountable capacity for self-awareness.”

This high regard for the self as moral agent, and hence for every individual, Robinson considers the authentic American democratic tradition, and it informs everything in When I Was a Child, whether she’s criticizing the consequences of religious fundamentalism or eviscerating, with the politest of irony, books blaming the ills of Western civilization on its religious history. Throughout it all, Robinson—learned, humane and unfailingly civil—is a pleasure to read.

]]>Ahmad was a Pakistani immigrant in the suburbs of London in the 1970s and 1980s. Predictably, the racism he encountered was wicked, yet he accomplishes a delightful feat with this memoir. He presents a hilarious tale where bigotry, wars, and religion play the straight man to his dry wit.

Ahmad’s survival skill is social assimilation, which begins with the cultivation of an English accent he describes as “perfect BBC.” Yet he is plagued by qualms about abandoning Islam for “vicarage garden party lukewarm Christianity.” Ahmad’s childhood pronouncements about Christianity (“There’s bad news about Jesus,” he reports of the Crucifixion) and Islam (“We make the Amish look like swingers”) are highly entertaining. Should Inuit be expected to fast for Ramadan, he wonders, considering their long days? When he finally gets an invitation for casual sex at university, he can’t figure out the logistics (“Where do I put my clothes?”). Ahmad survives three conversion attempts, deciding to stick with Islam after hearing a tape by the famous Canadian Muslim, Dr. Gary Miller. As a grad student with an Alfa Romeo and a microwave, he figures he can finally attract a girlfriend. “It didn’t go quite as expected,” is his comical refrain throughout.

This laugh-out-loud book has a deceptively simple structure, with each chapter representing a school year of his life, including summer vacation. It doesn’t feel like a literary crutch because it reflects Ahmad’s orderly, rational character. The complexity of his spiritual searching—and his desire for better cars—increases with each chapter. Funny stories about his Jaguar XJS and crushes on girls keep things light, but the book’s real value is in Ahmad’s explanation of misunderstandings between secular Westerners and Christian culture and the multi-faceted Muslim world. A feminist and a peacemaker, our “perfect gentleman” has this reader impatient for the sequel.